Adding a wireless AccessPoint through the Smart Device Framework

I have a couple questions:

In general, what is the general difference between the OpenNETCF.Net namespace and the OpenNETCF.Net.NetworkInformation namespace in the Smart Device Framework? There seems to be a lot of functionality overlap between the two. Is the OpenNETCF.Net namespace now deprecated in favor of the NetworkInformation namespace?

More specific开发者_StackOverflow社区ally, I have a device with a wireless adapter. My goal is to be able to query nearby access points and then connect to them through my own user interface.

OpenNETCF.Net.Networking.GetAdapters()[1] gives me my adapter object representing the wireless adapter. Even though this is a wireless adapter, IsWireless and IsWirelessZeroConfigCompatible both return false. However, NearbyAccessPoints DOES return a list of nearby access points as you would expect a wireless adapter to do.

I need a way to add one of the discovered access points to the PreferredAccessPoints collection. I have not found a method to accomplish this within the OpenNETCF.Net namespace. The only way I've found to add an AccessPoint is through the AddPreferredNetwork() method of the OpenNETCF.Net.NetworkInformation.WirelessZeroConfigNetworkInterface class. The problem I'm having is that I've been unable to find a way to obtain a WirelessZeroConfigNetworkInterface object. The object returned by the NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces() method is just a plain old NetWorkInterface object, not a WirelessZeroConfigNetworkInterface object as I hoped. I'm sure this is probably related to the issue with IsWireless returning false in the NetworkAdapter object.

Is there a way to construct the WirelessZeroConfigNetworkInterface object even though the framework seems to think it is not wireless? It looks like the functionality is there as demostrated by the Wireless related methods of the NetworkAdapter object.

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The history is a bit confusing, yes. Basically SDF 2.2 (or earlier, I don't recall any more) had everything in the OpenNETCF.Net namespace. When I was adding features in 2.3, I added a boatload of stuff in the OpenNETCF.Net.NetworkInformation namespace that paralleled the full framework. Some of that had functional overlap with things we had done in the wireless stuff, so I made the decision to move everything over to the OpenNETCF.Net.NetworkInformation namespace. I left the originals and marked them as deprecated to try to be friendly to existing deployments. The items you should use are the ones in the OpenNETCF.Net.NetworkInformation namespace.

Now on to how the stuff functions. First we query NDIS for all network interfaces. This gives us wired, RNDIS, wireless, etc - basically everything that the network stack knows about. NDIS, however, doesn't know much about "wireless" stuff - it does know some though.

Once we have our list of known adapters, we then ask NDIS if it's a wireless device - it can at least tell us that becasue the driver tells NDIS at registration.

Once we have a list of wireless adapters, we then walk them and ask the WZC subsystem if it knows about the adapter. WZC is an interface that knows everything about the wireless devices, allowing us to intereact with it through a common, published interface. If WZC does know about it (meaning the driver reported itself at initialization to WZC) then we create a WirelessZeroConfigNetworkInterface for it. If it isn't known by WZC, then we know it's wireless (NDIS told us it was), but we only have the NDIS methods for interacting with it.

NDIS doesn't give us a way to associate. It does give us a way to ask for nearby SSIDs. The Adapter interface you have, then, exposes the capabilities we know of.

In some cases the driver has a proprietary API to manipulate the WiFi settings (e.g. old Cisco cards).

What version of the OS is this you're running on? What WiFi chipset/adapter are you using?